“I judge nobody, my dear!—­unless I am obliged.  As you know, I am for liberty—­above all”—­she spoke with emphasis—­“for letting the past alone.  But I imagine you must certainly have learnt to do without us.  Now I ought to go to your father.”

But Marcella held her.

“Do you remember in the Purgatorio, mamma, the lines about the loser in the game:  ’When the game of dice breaks up, he who lost lingers sorrowfully behind, going over the throws, and learning by his grief’?  Do you remember?”

Mrs. Boyce looked down upon her, involuntarily a little curious, a little nervous, but assenting.  It was one of the inconsistencies of her strange character that she had all her life been a persistent Dante student.  The taste for the most strenuous and passionate of poets had developed in her happy youth; it had survived through the loneliness of her middle life.  Like everything else personal to herself she never spoke of it; but the little worn books on her table had been familiar to Marcella from a child.

“E tristo impara?” repeated Marcella, her voice wavering.  “Mamma “—­she laid her face against her mother’s dress again—­“I have lost more throws than you think in the last two years.  Won’t you believe I may have learnt a little?”

She raised her eyes to her mother’s pinched and mask-like face.  Mrs. Boyce’s lips moved as though she would have asked a question.  But she did not ask it.  She drew, instead, the stealthy breath Marcella knew well—­the breath of one who has measured precisely her own powers of endurance, and will not risk them for a moment by any digression into alien fields of emotion.

“Well, but one expects persons like you to learn,” she said, with a light, cold manner, which made the words mere convention.  There was silence an instant; then, probably to release herself, her hand just touched her daughter’s hair.  “Now, will you come up in half an hour?  That was twelve striking, and Emma is never quite punctual with his food.”

* * * * *

Marcella went to her father at the hour named.  She found him in his wheeled chair, beside a window opened to the sun, and overlooking the Cedar Garden.  The room in which he sat was the state bedroom of the old house.  It had a marvellous paper of branching trees and parrots and red-robed Chinamen, in the taste of the morning room downstairs, a carved four-post bed, a grate adorned with purplish Dutch tiles, an array of family miniatures over the mantelpiece, and on a neighbouring wall a rack of old swords and rapiers.  The needlework hangings of the bed were full of holes; the seats of the Chippendale chairs were frayed or tattered.  But, none the less, the inalienable character and dignity of his sleeping-room were a bitter satisfaction to Richard Boyce, even in his sickness.  After all said and done, he was king here in his father’s and grandfather’s place; ruling where they ruled, and—­whether they would or no—­dying where they died, with the same family faces to bear him witness from the walls, and the same vault awaiting him.